Category: Medicaid

The Oklahoma Health Care Authority (OHCA) has proposed a plan to “rebalance” Medicaid eligibility in the Sooner State. Although OHCA’s “plan” so far consists of only a single page of bullet points, what little that is already known makes clear that the plan would gut the existing Insure Oklahoma program and replace it with Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion by another name. Oklahoma policymakers should quickly reject OHCA’s latest proposal to expand Obamacare and refocus their efforts on improving the program for the most vulnerable.

Thousands of kids and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Oklahoma are already sitting on Medicaid waiting lists to get the home and community-based services that they desperately need.

Smaller insurers with experience in Medicaid, such as Centene Corp. and Molina Healthcare, are outperforming the broader insurance industry on the federal health exchanges. Their success is putting a spotlight on their business model as the Obama administration and other insurers seek to stabilize the fledgling individual market.

If Medicaid-like plan features become the norm, consumers and medical providers would be substantially affected. Such plans are often popular in the exchanges for their low premiums, but consumers have criticized limits on their access to medical providers such as doctors. And physicians fault the plans for low reimbursement rates.

Although she promises to tinker with the Affordable Care Act (see below) Clinton is not proposing to fix any of its largest problems.

So what does Hillary Clinton propose to do about Obamacare? Spend more money. She proposes (1) to limit out of pocket costs to 5% of family income by offering a tax credit of up to $5,000 for spending above that amount, (2) to limit premium expenses to 8.5% of income, (3) to fix the family glitch, whereby dependents who are offered unaffordable coverage at work are barred from the exchange and (4) to spend more money to enroll people in Medicaid.

Obamacare has caused health insurance premiums to skyrocket. It has caused millions of Americans who liked their health plans to lose their health plans. It has caused doctor and hospital networks to narrow. Now the Wall Street Journalreports that the Obamacare exchanges in Alabama and Alaska will each have one—that’s right, one—insurer offering plans. We’re moving toward “single insurer” health care.

The Congressional Budget Office says that the Obamacare subsidies for private insurance will cost $43 billion this year alone. That’s an average of $5,375 per person for those who have been added to the private insurance rolls—or $21,500 per family of four. Meanwhile, the typical 36-year-old (or younger) who makes $36,000 a year (or more) gets $0 under Obamacare.

Using a combination of subsidized premiums for Marketplace coverage, an individual mandate, and expanded Medicaid eligibility, ObamaCare has increased insurance coverage rates. The authors of this study assess the relative contributions to insurance changes of these different provisions in the law’s first full year.

Their four key findings include:

Insurance coverage was only moderately responsive to price subsidies, but the subsidies were still large enough to raise coverage by almost one percent of the population; the coverage gains were larger in states that operated their own health insurance exchanges (as opposed to using the federal exchange).

The exemptions and tax penalty structure of the individual mandate had little impact on coverage decisions.

The law increased Medicaid coverage both among newly eligible populations and those who were previously eligible for Medicaid (the “woodwork” effect), with the latter driven predominantly by states that expanded their programs prior to 2014.

There was no “crowdout” effect of expanded Medicaid on private insurance. Overall, we conclude that exchange premium subsidies produced roughly 40% of the ACA’s 2014 coverage gains, and Medicaid the other 60%, of which 2/3 occurred among previously-eligible individuals.

The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services on Monday announced a massive update to managed care in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. In doing so, it attempts to bring the program in line with the changes Medicaid has undergone over the last decade. The new rule is the agency’s guideline for modernizing the low-income health care program and strengthen its quality of care.

Medicaid managed care services are offered by risk-based managed care organizations, which contract with state Medicaid programs to offer care to enrollees. Essentially, they are the private insurer alternative to traditional fee-for-service Medicaid.

CMS hasn’t issued any new regulations to the program since 2002, but a lot has changed since then. Not only has the Medicaid program itself grown under the Affordable Care Act, but now about 80 percent of Medicaid enrollees are served through managed care delivery systems, according to CMS.

President Barack Obama is calling on taxpayers to shell out more money for his health reform law’s disastrous Medicaid expansion.

The president recently asked Congress to approve $106 billion in new Medicaid spending over the next 10 years. Nevermind that the Congressional Budget Office just concluded that, as is, Medicaid spending will add $1.3 trillion to the federal deficit by 2025. That’s $136 billion more than the agency projected last year.

And it’s not as if those dollars are being spent wisely. Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion is sticking taxpayers with a huge bill while doing little to help low-income Americans actually gain access to high-quality healthcare.

In a report, the Department of Health and Human Services said Monday that there are around two million low-income, uninsured people in those 20 states who have a mental illness or substance abuse disorder.

Medicaid has long been a joint federal-state program that offers near-free care to the very poor. Under the health law, Washington pays almost all of the costs of insuring people who have slightly higher incomes.

Opponents of expansion argue that neither states nor the federal government can afford to further swell the program, and that a shortage of providers to treat the newly insured poses an additional challenge in trying to enroll more people in it.

Many have blamed the increase on the Affordable Care Act, which expanded health insurance coverage to millions more Americans through Medicaid — known as Medi-Cal in California — and government-run health exchanges.

Last year, a national survey of 2,099 emergency doctors by the American College of Emergency Physicians reported that 28 percent of respondents said the volume of ER patients in their hospitals “increased greatly” since the health law took effect. And 47 percent said the volume “increased slightly.”

The central feature of the latest plan in Nebraska is to deliver Medicaid expansion benefits through health plans sold on the Obamacare exchange, instead of through the state’s managed care system. But, at the end of the day, this is really just a more expensive way to expand Medicaid under Obamacare.